Judaculla Rock
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Judaculla Rock
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Judaculla Rock
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| Location | 552 Judaculla Rock Rd., Cullowhee, North Carolina |
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| Coordinates | 35°18′02″N 83°06′34″W / 35.30056°N 83.10944°WCoordinates: 35°18′02″N 83°06′34″W / 35.30056°N 83.10944°W |
| NRHP Reference # | 13000116 |
| Added to NRHP | March 27, 2013 |
Judaculla Rock is a curvilinear-shaped outcrop of soapstone with quarry scars and petroglyphs. It is located on a 0.85-acre rectangular-shaped property, owned by Jackson County, approximately 60 meters east of Caney Fork Creek, a major branch of the northwestward-trending Tuckasegee River, in the mountains of western North Carolina.
The petroglyph boulder occurs within an artificially created bowl-shaped depression. Today this is covered with mowed grass (it was previously cultivated as a corn field) and bordered on the west by a thicket of river cane (Arundinaria gigantea). Slightly upslope and east of the boulder are a few smaller outcroppings of soapstone bedrock, at least two of which show definite scars left by quarrying for soapstone bowl manufacture.
The surface of the westward-slanting main boulder with petroglyphs, which measures roughly 22 square meters (240 sq ft); it includes scars left by soapstone bowl extraction. Three depressions show stem extraction and three more are hollow scallops. Numerous petroglyph designs have been pecked and incised into the surface. The densely packed motifs, especially those along the upper two-thirds of the boulder, often makes it difficult to distinguish between the carvings. A minimum count of the patterns revelas the following: 1,458 cup marks, 47 curvilinear units, ten bowl-shaped depressions, ten stick-like figures, nine rills, three concentric rings designs, three curvilinear motifs, three deer tracks, two claw-like imprints, one arc, one cross-in-circle, and one winged shape.
Petroglyphs that occur within three hollow scallops suggest that their production took place after soapstone bowl quarrying had ceased at the site, a finding supported by similar overlaps at a smaller soapstone boulder in western North Carolina (Brinkley Rock) and two more in northern Georgia (Track Rock Gap and Sprayberry Rock). In terms of stylistic cross-dating, the similarity between the concentric ring and cross-in-ring petroglyph designs on the boulder with patterns on ceramic from the region suggests that the petroglyphs over the Late Archaic soapstone extraction scars date somewhere between the Middle Woodland and Late Mississippian periods.
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